Bloomfire nets $8M, adds features to its SaaS for sharing knowledge

Bloomfire, a company based in Austin, Texas, has received $8 million in Series A funding from existing investors to continue to get enterprises to sign up for the Bloomfire’s web-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for sharing internal videos, quick answers, files and other information among a given company’s employees.

The new investment, from Austin Ventures and Redpoint Ventures, brings the total venture funding to $18 million. The company counts more than 200 companies as customers.

Along with the funding news, Bloomfire is announcing new features for its SaaS product, including the ability for multiple users to produce a single item, such as a post, and drag-and-drop functionality to quickly add content from outside the site.

The competitor question for Bloomfire, which identifies itself as a knowledge-sharing tool, is an interesting one. Because the site can do so many things, different kinds of companies can compete with different parts of the site, said the company’s CEO, Craig Malloy. Socialcast (see disclosure), Yammer and others let users maintain their own social pages and share information internally. With Jive Software, users can collaborate on products and projects and post updates. Quora-like companies for the enterprise, such as AnswerHub and Quandora, specialize in the internal Q-and-A component. And enterprises can share and store documents on Box, Dropbox and other sites.

Malloy looks forward to seeing how all the various technologies shake out in the next couple of years. It could be, he said, that even more blending will occur, with companies pulling in web conferencing. In any case, it’s worth wondering if it’s wiser to support a long of technologies or go big on just one.

Disclosure: SocialCast was backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.